Working between the US and the UK
This post started as an internal message to share with our team some interesting insights and things I’d learned from a talk I attended last week, but as I wrote it, I thought that it might be interesting to a wider audience.
I attended a talk by Erin Meyer who wrote the book The Culture Map. She’s a professor at INSEAD, and an expert in managing global teams.
I found the whole talk interesting — with tons of anecdotes about global business and differences between cultures — but obviously for me, in my role at Distilled, there were real practical uses for learning more about US and UK communication styles in particular.
Drawing me in with anecdotes
Most of my business experience is in the UK, US, and Europe, and so the anecdotes that stood out to me most strongly from Erin’s talk were business tales from Asia. Two specific stories that stuck with me were:
- The Hindi word “kal” (“कल”) which can mean either “tomorrow” or “yesterday” — used as the foundation of a story about the differences in the way we perceive and talk about time. This led to a funny anecdote about a group where the British were complaining about the timekeeping of their French counterparts which mystified their German colleagues who thought the exact same criticisms applied to the Brits
- A time that Erin was giving a seminar in (I think) Japan to a group of 10–15 people. At the end of her talk, she asked if anyone had any questions, and was met with a smiling silence. She went to move on, and her Japanese point of contact asked for a moment. He asked the group if they had any questions and was also met with silence. He waited an uncomfortable (for Erin!) length of time before calling on one of his colleagues by name, who responded with a polite “thank you, yes, I did have a question”. She was mystified!
The specific importance of this to UK / US collaboration was underscored by an off-hand comment Erin made in the Q&A when she noted that when people relocate from the UK to Japan or the US to China, they expect to find a different culture, and generally acclimatise well. The most common failures to acclimatise come when people relocate to similar but subtly different cultures that fall in the “uncanny valley” of feeling similar enough to home to be familiar, but different enough to be disconcerting and disorienting. Unsurprisingly, this applies to the US-UK “separated by a common language” (my favourite commentator on this is @lynneguist).
Although both the US and the UK came up a few times as examples during her talk, it was the resources she shared that have crystallised the usefulness and the details:
Understanding the similarities and differences between the US and UK
Erin kindly shared access to her tools and resources for attendees of her talk and so I obviously started out mapping the UK / US similarities and differences (note: focusing on communication / business culture — not just every surprise a traveller might encounter).
You can run your own analyses for just a few dollars but I want to talk about just a few key parts of the US / UK comparison. The UK and US fall relatively close together on most of the dimensions and differences are a matter of degree.
The two biggest differences of degree are:
- “Trusting” — both lean towards “task-based” trust compared to “relationship-based” trust but the US is far more extreme on this spectrum which might mean that Brits should seek to impress their American counterparts through diligent, prompt delivery and the immediate keeping of work promises while Americans might have to learn that their British colleagues need to get to know them and like them alongside the professional relationship
- “Communicating” — both lean towards “low-context” compared to “high-context” communication (which is something common across the English-speaking world). This essentially means that good communication is simple and clear, taken at face value, and repeated if necessary. Although much lower-context than much of the rest of Europe and Asia, the British communication style is higher-context than is normal in the US — with more expectation of reading between the lines and more subtlety. Brits: speak and write more explicitly and bluntly. Americans: expect nuance and ask for clarification if you need (and remember, if we’re mean to you, it means we like you)
Having seen the second of those, it seemed both appropriate, and no surprise to me that the first line of our company manifesto is “communication solves all problems” — but also that we might need to be clearer on the differences in what “good communication” means as we criss-cross the Atlantic.
Leadership and decision-making
The one area where we see UK / US cultures cross over each other from one side to the other are in the slightly-similar-sounding leading and deciding dimensions.
The UK falls quite middle-of-the road on both — halfway between egalitarian and hierarchical leadership styles and halfway between consensual and top-down decision-making. The US, meanwhile, falls more egalitarian in leadership style, and yet more top-down in decision-making.
This really stood out to me, and I was curious to figure out a bit more about what it meant in practice. I found this great HBR article which laid world cultures out on a 2x2 (I’m a sucker for a 2x2):
As with most of the analysis, the UK and US both fall in the same approximate area of the chart when compared to the rest of the world, but it’s in those subtle differences that we find the jarring miscommunications and opportunities to misunderstand one another. Based on a deeper dive into the HBR analysis, we can see that:
- Brits should expect their American colleagues to speak up loudly before a decision is made no matter what your relative positions are (egalitarian) and yet to align quickly and support whatever decision the boss makes even if it isn’t what they’d have chosen (top-down). Decisions can also be seen as a little less permanent and more subject to later revision in the US than the UK and British bosses should get used to their American colleagues expecting strong, clear statements of “your decision” even if you have to revise it later.
- Americans bosses should expect that they may have to ask Brits explicitly to speak up with any objections and remind them that they intend to take a decision to which the whole team commits (it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most useful books we have come across as a trans-Atlantic team is Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team which covers “conflict and commit” in great detail)
Summary
Based on all this, here’s your brief checklist for immaculate US-UK business relationships:
Brits:
- Focus on execution and doing what you said you will — especially in those critical first few interactions
- Speak and write more clearly than you are used to and say exactly what you mean
- No matter what your relative status, speak up clearly before decisions are made and say that you will commit to the decision once made
Americans:
- Be prepared for it to take longer to get the obvious signals that your colleague likes and trusts you than you are used to and take any opportunity you can to get to know your British counterparts better
- Expect subtleties in communication style and ask for plain / blunt speaking if you aren’t sure what something means
- Explicitly ask for any conflict while discussing forthcoming decisions — especially if you are working with people who may feel that the hierarchy of the company means they shouldn’t speak up at this point
Things I haven’t covered here
Erin talked a great deal about the ways that not all individuals in a culture think or behave the same way, and the ways that outliers can be perceived both in their own cultures and abroad. I haven’t dug into any of that though it’s clearly worth bearing in mind as you apply all of this in your own life.
Your experiences
What have you noticed when doing business on both sides of the Atlantic? What haven’t I covered here? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts and experiences.
